


Cinders

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [24]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Cinder-inspired Alt-Power, Gen, Inspired by RWBY, Robbery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:28:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23041000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Not everyone comes out of their triggers in a good place, especially not when you can instantly cause sand to turn into molten glass.Or: in which Taylor ends up more like Damsel after her trigger and there's nobody there who can stop her.
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 4
Kudos: 113





	Cinders

**Author's Note:**

> cw for some actually pretty extreme thoughts and some descriptive violence, I suppose.

The impulses lingered like hooks and claws, all carving lines through the valleys in her brain. There was an itch, phantom pain in anything but name, that marred the left half of her face and her left arm, so close to agony without being real. It was an echo of an event, of terror and spite and hatred, rotting away in the pockmarks along her skin, in the gap where her left eye used to be.  
  
Taylor knew she had never been pretty before the incident. There was little to say about her features, too-wide mouth, a body she never quite grew into, always long and gangly and _off_ in some vague, hard-to-place way. People called her uncanny, their true thoughts given forum and dialogue once she and Emma broke apart during the summer before high school. She was worse, now, an empty eye socket with wrinkled scar tissue surrounding it, tracing the line of her cheekbone and spreading down to the left side of her throat, where it marred the gap between it and her shoulder, her shoulder, and then the full length of her left arm. It was a burn scar, and visibly so, in some places flesh looked almost like melted wax, and in others, the damage was more obvious, valleys of marred skin interspersed among spaces where the skin was too smooth and flat, no freckles or body hair or blemishes, pale white and almost sickly looking.  
  
Flexing her fingers, the alien feeling of not _having_ any feeling in the majority of those fingers—she ignored it. Nobody could even see her scars right now, not the one on her face or on her arm. Her costume suitably covered it, a full mask with one-way glass lenses, hiding her imperfections. The long sleeves and glove of her outfit hid the rest, hid the stain, and it was better for it. Her bodysuit was made up of grey mostly, with dark grey and black to form detail, a small pouch connected to the belt around her hips, hidden at her back. Gloves covered both hands except for the fingers, only luck having stopped the burn from reaching the tips, giving her this much, letting her use her power without needing to show the thing that didn’t give it to her, not initially.  
  
Lisa had designed the costume in the end—it wasn’t like she had an eye for artistic pursuits.  
  
The people around her were terrified, and perhaps justifiably so. They sat, huddled in small groups, while the rest of the gang she’d joined picked through their stored valuables in what was supposed to be one of the most protected banks in Brockton. There was a reason that robbing a bank was a cliche of television, after all, with the advent of technology - among other things - it was generally a poor idea to rob the place where everyone thought someone would rob. The last time someone had tried to rob the Brockton Bay Central Bank had been close to eleven years ago, and it hadn’t even been done by someone _with_ powers.  
  
Then again, it wasn’t her _team_ they were terrified of, was it?  
  
No, they were terrified of her—of _Cinder_.  
  
Apathy was generally what she felt nowadays, if not interspersed by moments of anger-turned-rage, but even that still made her chest clench. She had tried to do the right thing, to begin with, getting powers had been... horrifying, in a word. Getting them not from the thing that had mutilated had hurt, and getting them out of terror when there was no real threat, the memory of fire burning through the skin like acid, that was even worse. So she had lashed out, she had gone out, found Hookwolf, and reduced him to slag, spearing his core through with the metal of his transformed state. She had fooled him, played at joining his gang, in a shit costume with shit motives, white skin visible, and had just asked for him to transform, to show her, and he hadn’t lived to regret trusting her.  
  
But then, heroes didn’t murder people. She’d thought, maybe naively, that killing a man whose ‘three strikes’ had long since eclipsed thirty, who would’ve gone to the birdcage if they ever managed to keep him locked up long enough, and who had spent most of his cape career regularly murdering minorities, would be justified. Because he didn’t have a kill order, because her power didn’t just let her do it normally, she’d spooked people; spooked the PRT, who looked at Hookwolf’s core, drooling blood and split through by a hundred spears, and decided she was a villain.  
  
In the end, they hadn’t been wrong, not really.  
  
“Sit back down.” The words slipped through her lips, sharp, as her focus snapped towards the unsteadily rising curly brown hair girl. She seemed familiar, not that Taylor could bother to put a name to it. Instead of doing as she asked, the girl remained standing, fists clenched and eyes hard.  
  
Taylor sighed bleakly, eyes drifting off to a space above the girl’s shoulder, where the teller was looking pale and horrified.  
  
“You can’t just do this,” the curly-haired girl spat, anger lacing her voice. “You’re terrorizing people, and they left only _you_ , I’m not sc—”  
  
Molten glass has odd properties, really. She couldn’t feel the heat from it - she couldn’t feel heat at all, anymore, not after getting powers, but then she was immune to temperatures in general now, so it was no real loss - but at least to her own fingers, it felt... soft, almost clay-like. Producing it was easy, the tips of her fingers dragging through the sand in her satchel, superheating it in seconds, turning it all to liquid glass that the secondary part of her power, the telekinetic ability to manipulate things heated to certain levels, dragging the clump back into a crude shape in her palm, keeping it there as her power poured energy into the material at speeds that broke conventional wisdom about thermodynamics. She lashed her hand out, lazily, theatrical, just like Lisa had taught her, and turned that piece of molten glass into a projectile, one that slammed into the ankle of the angry girl, the one on her feet, and urged it to wrap itself into a manacle. It always used heat to manipulate heated objects, but she had just enough to fashion the anklet and weld it to the ground before it was inert.  
  
The brown-haired girl crumpled to the ground, screaming in agony. Even if it had cooled down to room temperature with her ministrations, it had still been molten glass applied directly to her skin for a second, maybe a second and a half.  
  
“Everything alright, Cinder?” Grue’s voice asked, crackling over the shared earpiece. Resisting the urge to shrug, Taylor directed her gaze away from the quietly sobbing girl and towards the rest of the lobby, her teammates all still sequestered away in the bank’s depths.  
  
“Someone tried to resist,” she said, and even to herself, her voice sounded blank, distant. Maybe she was still repressing all of this.  
  
There was a short pause. “You didn’t kill them, right?”  
  
“I didn’t,” she confirmed, another twinge in her chest, this one she banished. She had only killed one person, and while she’d mutilated plenty of others, half from burning down houses and people getting stuck inside, she had made sure that it was only and would remain as only one person. “But I did burn her a little, she’s crying.”  
  
A breath, relief, and another twinge in her chest accompanied that statement. Taylor grit her teeth, ignoring Grue’s attempt to backpedal and imply he wasn’t trying to hurt her feelings. She shut him out, turning her gaze back on to the huddled masses, the terrified people, the girl in agony, burned around her ankle. She didn’t feel bad, and what must that say about her? Terror had broken her, and she was what had been left over, in the end.  
  
Then, of course, Glory Girl exploded through the glass ceiling. Taylor should’ve really felt worse about it, felt more fear, but even with that aura effect washing over her, clinging to her skin, whispering awe and terror in equal measures, she just felt... _numb_. The floating Brute’s eyes flashed to the brown-haired girl, sobbing and grasping at her leg, just above where she’d welded a circlet of glass into her flesh, and then jumped to her. Rage filled her face, a rictus of anger and horror and all the things she’d seen on her own face. Mindless hatred, filling a person to the brim.  
  
It was no surprise that she launched forward at her. Yet, with anger came a certain sort of recklessness, single-minded and thoughtless. She just stepped to the side to avoid Glory Girl’s arc, the Brute crashing into the glass-and-marble teller booth just behind where she had been standing, embedding herself inside. Taylor lashed her fingers out, coming into contact with the forcefield. She wasn’t sure why, exactly, but since her power worked on _people_ , but not liquids or gasses, it also worked on forcefields, or at least it worked on them because it was trying to work on the person beneath. Heat, visible and shimmering, bloomed over the entirety of the personal forcefield, the heat of the sun pumped into it for a brief second before it shattered. Glory Girl reeled, her skin red and sunburnt, agony and confusion writ on her face, hesitation coming to her as it did to all Brutes who rarely felt pain, people who thought they were always above their peers, like the ones who had done what they did to her. Taylor didn’t even hesitate from that point, gathering the tips of her fingers against the bulletproof glass, turning it into scorched, magmatic silica and twisting it into a blunted spear, the heat vanishing as the glass pane distorted, twisted, and then lurched out from where it had been formed, slamming hard into the side of the now very vulnerable cape’s head, sending her to the floor with a yell of agony.  
  
There was only silence, interspersed by Glory Girl’s quiet whimpers of pain, muffled by her broken jaw, following her display of power. The girl who had tried to rise looked a mix of horrified and enraged, though she couldn’t yank herself free from the binding around her ankle to make good on her emotions. She even went so far to reach out at those around her, but with Taylor’s display had come people wary of her, and so she couldn’t reach far enough in any direction to touch a single person. The fact that she tried, though, was interesting.  
  
“Tattletale?” Taylor asked, her good hand coming up to press into the button on her earpiece. “We might have a cape. She keeps trying to touch people after getting angry at me.”  
  
There was a short pause before Lisa, breathless and almost sounding excited, came on the line. “What’s she look like?”  
  
Taylor took a moment to really look the girl over. Curly brown hair, plain features, freckles, a mixture of softer body features compounded by a gaunt, tired look, like someone who overworked and ate a single meal every day out of necessity, as they had no time to themselves. Taylor relayed that information, just as she was taught, only to receive silence in return.  
  
Finally, after a few agonizing seconds, Lisa, sounding a mix of chagrined and horrified, responded. “That might be Panacea, Cinder.”  
  
Huh. So it was. She still had her scars because of a mix of scheduling errors and the fact that her wounds weren’t lethal enough to be of notice. Maybe if her father had the money, she might’ve remained in the hospital after the incident for long enough that it would have coincided with one of Panacea’s trips, but she just hadn’t. There hadn’t been enough time or funding to keep her there, not to mention aside from keeping her in a sterile and safe environment, there also wasn’t much of a _reason_. Yes, they had to remove her eye, but it wasn’t because the burns were so severe she was at risk of dying. It was because her eye had caught on fire, and there was no salvaging an eye like that.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Taylor said, eventually, in the direction of Panacea. Her voice didn’t sound all that contrite. “About the burns, I mean, and I guess your sister, but that was self-defence.”  
  
“I’ll fucking kill you!” Panacea spat, eyes hard, face red and enraged and all the things she’d seen mirrored on her sister’s face, a sister who was still mostly unconscious, twitching and groaning on the ground while blood dribbled out from her mouth.  
  
“I hope you do,” Taylor said, after a time, and she found that she wasn’t quite lying. Whatever Panacea had expected in response to that statement, it sure wasn’t that, and the girl deflated like her strings had been cut, gawping at her with confused, rage-hazy eyes.  
  
Turning her eyes towards the window, Taylor paused. Cop cars had lined up, enclosing the area in a perimeter, while what looked like PRT transport was unloading, including a few people in costumes. “Tattletale,” Taylor said slowly, blankly, feeling the first simmerings of that anger, of the things she’d learned to bury beneath the bleak headspace she liked to keep herself in. “I think we have capes on the scene.”  
  
“How many?” Lisa was quick to reply, the sound of shuffling and cursing audible both on her earpiece and in the area, her eyes flashing back as Brian and Alec stepped out of the employees only area, each one handling a large duffel bag.  
  
Turning her eyes back to the scene, she counted. “Five outside, two on the ground here.”  
  
Lisa cursed beneath her breath. “Alright, we’re going to get to packing and leaving.”  
  
Coming up beside her, Brian glanced between the two downed capes, then back at her. “You did a good job,” he tried, but even his voice was distant, fake. “I’m proud.”  
  
Anger burned in her throat like bile. “I don’t need your _approval_ ,” Taylor spat sharply, drawing a slight flinch out of her team leader, who’s helmeted head turned to her. Other emotions took advantage of the gap anger left over, anxiety, glee, things started to slip up from beneath the veil of dissociation and gave things _colour_ , made her fingers twitch, itch, made her want to bite and scream and _hurt_. “Fuck off. Deal with things on your own end.”  
  
Apparently not seeing a way to win the fight - he _always_ tried when he thought he had an avenue, self-righteous and up to his own ass, assured that his own brand of professional criminality was somehow _better_ , more morally justified - Brian raised both hands and stepped away, Alec with him.  
  
Taking a shallow, shaky breath, Taylor tried to orient herself, tried to focus, but it wasn’t working. Her power fed on it, her skin prickling, burning, a hazy focus sliding over her eyes, people becoming targets, her attention wavering. She tamped down, stamped on the anger, but just like her father, it didn’t work, it buckled and bit at fingers extended in hopes of soothing. Her fist lashed out, carried on by the upsurge of emotion, and impacted the bulletproof glass just to her right, the window contorting as it was flash heated to temperatures so hot it hurt to look at. Her knuckles whined, the early signs of a bruise, raised red flesh compounded by a lick of red blood along the middle knuckle, helped ground her, the pain a respite from the itching and gnawing in her scar tissue.  
  
It still wasn’t enough, though.  
  
Breathing out sharply, Taylor urged the molten glass mentally, shaping the entire pane into something like a spear. It was still orange when she was done twisting it, and looked more like a pencil with a corkscrew tip, narrowed down into a sharp point, but she still couldn’t feel the heat. The world felt cold, she _was_ cold, she wanted warmth, and anger offered its heat with aplomb, even if it was only in her head. Her teeth grit, her fingers tightened, forming furrows in the semisolid scorched glass. It was weighty in her hand, pulled on her tendon, and when she pressed it against one of the stone walls it _hissed_ , flames licking at the material, trying to leap to it and finding no way to. Stone was, to a point, fireproof, even her own power could only make it explode when she pumped heat into it, to forget about her spear.  
  
“Cinder,” Lisa’s voice wasn’t on the earpiece this time, and instead was a few paces away. Taylor snapped her head around, teeth grit, bared even if nobody could see it. Rachel was a bit behind Lisa, looking at her with calculative eyes, the same eyes she sent at the dogs she hadn’t yet brought properly to heel. Rachel understood her, but only inasmuch as someone who had providence over her, a master that she didn’t _want_ or _cared_ for. “We’re going to be releasing the hostages and attempt to use that to flee. We’ll be riding on the dogs, okay?”  
  
The haze lifted, but only long enough to draw a shaky nod out of her. She didn’t want to come down from the high, the feeling buzzed beneath her skin, made her fingers twinge with excitement. She wanted to fight and lash out, the pressure from her power to use it, to press and burn and turn people to ash beneath her fingers, it was _intoxicating_ , as intoxicating as the anger itself was. She resisted, squashed the itch like she had every other time, but it still lingered, still pressed like a migraine without the pain.  
  
Lisa retreated after that, leaving just her and Rachel to stare at one another as they planned how things would go. She had the opportunity to be privy to that information, it wasn’t like they _withheld_ it from her, but she rarely took part in it. They gave her simple jobs, things to break, people to burn, and she was perfectly fine with that. Rachel was a bit like her, simple plans suited her best, and she was _friends_ with Rachel most of the time, even if they fought regularly.  
  
Nevertheless, by the time Lisa had returned with Grue and Alec, the Wards had arrayed themselves out front, preparing for the inevitable conflict. Glory Girl had rattled to consciousness, but her eyes were glassy and hazy, Lisa stopping to check on her before claiming she’d be fine after a while. Panacea remained welded to the floor, regardless of how many times she tried to pull herself free - glass could be surprisingly dense and hard to break, given the right heating - and the huddled masses looked at the lot of them with terror and fear. Something inside her purred when someone looked at her dead on and then _flinched_ , but she ignored it, grinding it beneath her heel before she could be tempted to draw similar reactions out of the rest.  
  
Then, finally, it was time. Taylor went around to each teller booth, sliding fingers along the bulletproof glass, peeling the material free from the frames once it was suitably heated. She wrapped the material around her arm, the synthetic material of her costume easily handling the heat when all else would’ve combusted near instantly. By the time she had reclaimed most of it, she’d ended up with a lump of semi-liquid glass the size of a small person, keeping the full bulk heated to malleability with one hand pressed to it, pushing energy into it while she dragged energy out by telekinetically manipulating it to remain floating. She had no delusions about being able to hold the material with her strength alone, it all likely weighed several hundred pounds, if not more, so while it frustrated her that she had to focus on cycling heat in and pulling heat out to maneuver it, she didn’t mind too much.  
  
Rachel, at the back, bulked her dogs back up, making them ever-larger, bony protrusions shuddering as reptilian tails swayed eagerly. If not for the maw of shark-like teeth, Taylor could almost say they were _happy_ or excited, but it was hard to discern expressions on dogs, let alone on dogs Rachel had pumped her power into. She was personally feeling giddy, feeling the heat in her body as she twisted and churned the glass into a single sphere, all molten orange and gingerly held together with telekinetic force, her fingers buzzing, her chest rattling away. Excitement, mixed with anger and spite towards Brian, kept her afloat where in any other situation she would’ve sunken back down into apathy. Why did she let herself remain that way? She’d never know, maybe it was easier, but she was _happy_ now, the world had colour, she was so _fucking_ warm.  
  
Lisa’s words had no sounds to them, just meaning. The world was a buzz, colours and heat churned through her veins like a drug, pumped by her heart which rattled a staccato beat. Grue cloaked the area in shadow, blinding, deafening, and the hostages began to run, fled out through the smoke as a group. Taylor couldn’t see, didn’t need to see or hear or _feel_ , and only when Grue’s hand came to rest on her shoulder did she move, listening to him, even when he was good for nothing, just a self-justifying hypocrite with a chip on his shoulder.  
  
Aegis was the first one she saw when she erupted from the smoke, the sensation of wind and sun on her skin, so warm for something she never felt. Bitch’s dogs exploded out beside her in grand leaps, bearing down on the cops, Rachel and Alec riding one, Brian hauling Lisa up from the side of another. She twisted her ball, removing her hand from its side, a liquid sun that hurtled forward, slamming into Aegis’ lower half, throwing him free from the air. She let the ball go, hurling far outside of the reach of her telekinesis, the object impacting with the building across the road, lighting it up as flames exploded across the walls, catching the plastic siding and spreading. People turned in horror, looking as the five-story building, an apartment turned into a series of too-expensive stores, exploded into flame.  
  
That distraction was just enough.  
  
Rachel’s hand caught her scarred shoulder, no pain echoing as nubby fingers caught on the fabric of her clothes and hauled her up onto the side of Rachel’s beast. The cops turned, eyes lighting up with recognition, and one turned his nozzle towards them, intending to cover them in foam, to stop them. A boy in golden armour was near a larger gun, which was also swivelling towards them. Taylor’s fingers tightened around her spear, her power pulsed, turning it molten, and she directed it out like an arrow, the spear shearing through the nozzle and then through the man’s hip, stapling him to the floor as the cop screaming and bucked, his wound cauterizing instantly as the glass spear cooled. The tinker at his machine faltered, eyes flashing to the cop, and couldn’t adjust him aim quick enough before the lot of them, dogs, money packed away into bags strapped to the sides, vanished into the unexpecting inner-city streets.  
  
The oh-so-distant wail of cop cars and Taylor’s own laughter, high and hysterical, warmth gradually leaking back out of her as a promised apathy slid into her chest, carried them all the way back to base.

**Author's Note:**

> Info on her relationship with her shard:
> 
> Speaking on Taylor's relationship with her Shard, it's a toxic one. She's unlike Burnscar in that using her power isn't actually manipulating her headspace, and instead she's more like Damsel, where her power rewards her for certain mental and behavioral decisions while also generally making her unstable. In Taylor's case, her shard rewards her for reckless and destructive actions and behaviors, always encouraging her to burn every bridge, break down every wall, do things to hurt others. When she doesn't do them, she feels muted and neutral, and her powers are more clunky as an aside. She's not unhappy or happy when in her neutral state, but she's also kinda cold. Her power removed her ability to sense temperatures, in large part because she's immune to them, mostly to keep from carbonizing herself when she uses her power. So, at all points, she just feels lukewarm, or maybe a little below lukewarm, not so much that it's cold, but enough that it's colder. She mentally associates warmth with feeling more emotions, and perceives her own emotions in varying levels of 'heat' that sort of swirls around in her chest, a bit like synesthesia, but not for music or colors. Taylor is also in general more emotionally volatile, swinging between extremes at a moment's notice.
> 
> Her power itself:
> 
> Cinder has the ability to rapidly and near instantly superheat anything she touches with her hand. While materials interact differently with heat, she generally uses this to melt metal and forms of sand or glass and reshape them into weapons, which she then controls with the secondary portion of her ability: a telekinetic control over any materials heated above an unknown threshold within 15 feet of herself. She has shown the capacity to use this ability to control where exploding materials expel their force towards, as in the incident where she superheated concrete to cause violent explosions of shrapnel. 
> 
> Cinder’s telekinetic control is detailed enough to create dozens of sharp weapons at once, control numerous separate things simultaneously, and shape complicated structures. She does appear to have to focus when superheating things, however she has been seen multi-tasking while doing so before, or doing so quick enough that the period of focus is too negligible to act on in any meaningful capacity.


End file.
